The new site is WordPress 1.5. Translating the site from MovableType to WordPress was stunningly easy, with automated scripts provided by WP handling most of the work. The most time-consuming bit was moving over her extra pages, on the sidebar there. WordPress is very easy to skin, and we went through a number of options before settling on this Theme, entitled ‘Thirteen’. It’s written by WordPress wonderkind Becca, who has several themes up for option. The sidebar opening menus were cribbed from several WordPress themes, drawing the elements together to make what you see there.

WordPress supports a number of neat options, including incredibly handy plug-ins. Pixiepalace.com uses Random Quotes for the quote selection on the left, Search Pages, to allow the search function to look at pages as well as posts, and SecureImage for the captcha that is even now making you squint to decide if that’s a 1 or an I.

I have to say, I was so impressed by WordPress that I toyed around with the idea of moving Randomdialogue over to the system as well. You can see my results over here (warning: url will expire). I ended up deciding to stick with Blogger for now, but during my mulling period I did a lot of research. What you see on that dev page is the result of a night’s worth of hard work, and without resources I wouldn’t have been able to do it. If you’re thinking of moving a Blogger blog to WordPress, I highly recommend Justinsomnia’s How-To and Andy Skelton’s improved transfer program.

We had a lot of fun making the new site work. I hope you enjoy it.

– Michael

6 Comments

Glad to hear my struggle to import Blogger posts and Haloscan comments into WordPress is useful to someone else down the line. Be sure to check out my post, importing haloscan comments into wordpress which treats the import from Blogger with a little more clarity. Hopefully this all should get a little easier with WordPress 2.0. You might want to wait on Randomdialogue until then.

Also, check out my monthchunks plugin for a way to display the archive links in a more compact fashion.